(Courtesy of Tactical Life)

If you don’t think about it too much, constructing a knife should be simple. It’s only two planes of steel meeting at an extremely acute angle. Sure, it sounds simple. But there are as many shapes and sizes of blades as there are tasks for them to perform, from the delicate work of the sharpest scalpels, to machetes that hack through jungles, to diamond blades that cut tough materials in the bowels of industrial machinery.

It’s the task it will complete and the environment in which it will be used that determines how the blade will look, feel and balance, and how the edge interacts with the material it’s intended to cut.

When designing a combat knife, there are a few questions to answer before the design should even begin. Will it be purely a fighting knife that won’t be regularly used for any other task, like fieldcraft and basic chores, or will it be the only fixed-blade knife a warfighter carries in the field? It has to be good at two things: slashing and stabbing. Thin, viciously pointed blades are great for puncturing through gear and clothing to get to the flesh beneath, but they are usually poor slashers. A clip-point blade might have a nicer belly for slashing, which would also make it a decent field knife, especially for dressing game, but the blade’s shape can leave a weak, narrow tip that isn’t ideal for stabbing chores and can break.

Sharp Goddess

The Nyx combat knife from Spartan Blades does a beautiful job of balancing the capabilities of a slashing and stabbing weapon to create a truly universal combat/utility/survival knife. It’s a sturdy blade of CMP S35VN steel that’s 0.19 inches at it’s thickest, making it plenty strong for hard batoning and carving.

Read more – Tactical Life

(Featured image courtesy of tactical-life.com)